I Need A Shower

It's over 100 degrees Farenheit today in Bangkok (for those of you in Celsius land that translates as TOO FREAKING HOT!!!!!). I knew this would be the case so I left the hotel at 7am to have a walk around before it got too hot. No such luck:



It's enough of a challenge to write this blog from Thailand, YouTube censorship aside. I pull up blogspot (where I write my entries) and this is what I get:

Not as confusing, though, as my breakfast this morning:

Aah, yes. The Rambuttan and Mangosteen, fruits you can only get in this part of the world. And they're in season. Open 'em up and this is what you get:

Sweet, succulent, juicy. Nothing quite like it, hard to compare to any fruit I've ever eaten.

In the Cathay Pacific lounge at Bangkok Airport waiting for the flight that takes me to the last stop on this tour, Hong Kong.

Banned in Bangkok

You won't be seeing any video from Thailand (where I currently am) because the government has banned YouTube, where I host the video for my blog.

When I go to youtube.com nothing loads.

When I look at this blog from here none of the video loads.

First time I've actually seen censorship first hand.

The Big Tease

I stay in some really great hotel rooms on my business trips, such as the one I'm in right now on the 58th floor of the Swissotel The Samford in Singapore. The problem is that I'm usually only in the room for a few hours (arrive late night from the airport, sleep, wake up early and go to work -- after which I go to the airport to go on to the next city (it'll be Bangkok tomorrow night).

But short stay or not, the view from my 58th floor balcony (how about that, a hotel room this high up with a balcony) is pretty darn amazing.

Mmmmm. Fooooood.

This kind of business trip involves three things -- working, flying, and eating. The eating part is by far the best.

I may not get to do any sightseeing on this trip, but there is some killer local food around the Shangri-La Hotel Kuala Lumpur where I'm writing this at 6:30 Monday morning.

That's called Nasi Kampur, a popular Malay dish. It may look like a bunch of random stuff dumped on a plate, but MAN it's tasty. That's chicken sate on the upper right, a deliciously flavored chicken leg on the upper left, and under that fried egg there's a heap of Malaysian fried rice.

Work starts for me in a half-hour so it's time for breakfast now. More later...

Wha Hoppen?

I'm back on the road with a vengeance. Just stepped off a 14-hour flight from SFO and am now in Cathay Pacific's "The Wing" biz class lounge at Hong Kong International, where it's currently 7:30am on Sunday morning, waiting for a connecting flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Another 3 and a half hours in the air, oh yay.





The Cathay long-haul biz class experience was excellent as always (thank goodness for those upgrades or I'd be dead by now). Will be in Asia the remainder of the week, a different city each day, so stay tuned to see my tired ass bringing you more of the little things I can see on the way from the airport to the hotel.

UAL 11 JFK to SFO

I've got something ridiculous, along the lines of 4 flights or so, that I haven't blogged on yet. I'm so sick of planes I can't even bear to write about them. So in a hope to spark some inspiration I'm moving to a more video oriented format. So here's a moment of this flight back home, in which I got an upgrade to the unparalelled domestic travel experience of United's "PS" flights between JFK and SFO/LAX. You get their international business class seat in biz class (where I sat) and I could stretch straight out and not have my feet even brush against the seat in front of me.



The 2 guys taking care of our cabin were hapless, one younger dude who was trying hard but just didn't get it, and a very very senior guy who also tried hard but was just plain forgetful. I sat next to, and had nice conversation with, one of the founders of a fantastic winery in Carneros (Napa side) who co-lamented with me on the sad state of affairs. But still, this is the best biz class domestic coast-to-coast experience currently going (please keep it up UAL).

Going Where No Man Has Gone Before

What a pompous title for a blog post. In fact, I'm just trying to get some video going on my respective blogs. If this experiment works here, you'll see me geeking out beyond belief at tonight's Giants vs Dodgers game @ AT&T/SBC/PacBell/MaysField. If not, then I gotta try something else.